I attended a conference yesterday on the relationship between population growth and climate change. Sounds interesting, I know.
The conclusions were entirely anti-climactic. More people, more carbon emissions, faster climate change. Less population growth, less emissions...you get the point. The correllation is actually pretty close to 1:1 (A 1% increase in population will lead to a 1% increase in green house gas emissions). There are variations between socioeconomic groups, age groups, and urban vs. rural dwellers, but the results held nonetheless overall. Policy makers argue that population control policies like family planning (condoms and abortions) and the likes of China's one child policy are thus environmentally friendly policies. I guess I don't see why not.
One member of the audience made the interesting comment that levels of carbon emissions are correlated to the standard of living. That is, industrial countries emit more pollution and have a higher quality of life. I don't remember what the comment was made in relation to. The guy was going on forever, clearly enamoured by the sound of his own voice. But that little nugget stuck with me. He didn't just say higher CO2 emissions means more wealth or affluence, but "quality of life." So does it then follow that one cannot have a high quality of life without creating green house gases? And the more I pollute, the better off I am?
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Hey... nice blog and hip name. Don't you just love that phrase..."quality of life." The director of my department, an economist, talks about those words. Through complex equations and selected variables, like # of refrigerators per household and literacy rates, pow, bam, boom, you can measure the quality of life of a person anywhere in the world. Amazing! Well, I take great caution about such phrases and what they are actually measuring and not measuring. "Quality of life" is not talking about a person, but a population without cultural relevance. Large statistical measurements that to me mean nothing, except developed countries are consumers and consumption means pollution. Maybe its the anthropologist in me, but large statistical measurements are interesting, but tell us little about how people are living, a cultural phenomenon, not numerical measurement.
I think in the future we will start to see a shift in the "quality of life" vs. emissions relationship. In the past and present these two factors have been directly related. However, in the future I think we will see a shift.
More developed countries will be (and currently are) the leaders in more sustainable measures. This translates into construction practices, energy sources, transportation methods, carbon trading, etc. This shift will lead to an inverse realtionship between "quality of life" vs. emissions. Therefore, higher quality of life will mean lower overall emissions as these societies will have the knowledge, capital and incentives in place to foster this change.
I think your question there was pretty rhetorical.. so Im not going to address it, but rather a comment you made in the first paragraph. Access to birth control, condoms, family planning, etc. is not a "population control policy," just to set the record straight. (China's policy is another story.) Access to those products and services is a human rights and global health issue, as well as an environmental one. I think its pretty much a win-win; Im surprised that more "environmentalists" haven't given this exact issue the weight and attention it deserves.
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